Hungarian film director László Nemes attends the photocall of “Moulin” at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France. Photo: Marco Barada / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect

Hungarian Jewish filmmaker László Nemes talked about antisemitism, the “politicization of cinema” regarding Jewish subject matters, and what he believes is an unhealthy “obsession with Jews” in a new interview with The Guardian published on Monday.

Nemes’s latest film, “Moulin,” which is about French resistance leader Jean Moulin, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.

His 2025 film “Orphan” is about a teenage Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by being hidden in an orphanage. While he searches for his missing father, he discovers the truth about how his mother survived the Holocaust. The film has so far not secured a US distribution deal, and Nemes believes it is because of the film’s Jewish subject matter at a time when tensions are high around the world.

“You should be able to talk about these things without being ostracized,” the filmmaker told The Guardian, adding that he feels “a little bit” ostracized by the industry.

“Even some response [to ‘Orphan’] from the media smells of an ideological standpoint,” he noted, explaining that he thinks the film was “ignored” at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the West,” added the director, whose grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. He also described a “race obsession” and a “puritan, moralizing, self-righteousness” ideology that he believes has taken over the cultural world and online.

Nemes won an Oscar in 2016 for his debut feature film “Son of Saul,” which follows a day and a half in the life of an Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner who is forced to clear out the corpses of fellow Jews from the gas chambers and place the bodies in ovens to be incinerated. The film won an array of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign language film. When asked how he thinks “Son of Saul” would be accepted if it was released today, Nemes told The Guardian: “I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today. Because of the politicization of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered … Nobody would touch it with a 10-feet pole.”

He also said he thinks boycotting Israeli film institutions, which thousands of Hollywood figures have pledged to do, is “anti-humanist regression.”

“And because it’s not identified as this, I think it’s very effective at spreading,” the filmmaker said. “And one of its very potent vectors has been antisemitism … The Jew has always been [cast as] the sort of internal enemy, and I think now [the idea of] the Jew as the internal enemy of the West has reached the dimensions of European antisemitism before the takeover by the National Socialist [Nazi] party.”

He further criticized the thousands of film industry professionals who support cultural boycotts of Israel or protest Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists in the enclave who orchestrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Obviously, they prefer to attach themselves to an ideology that’s been around for a long time and that pretends to be humanitarian, but it’s actually not what it purports to be,” Nemes said. “Had they really cared about the people in this region, they would have revolted against these people being ruled by a totalitarian death cult that’s actually killing its own population and at unprecedented levels.”

He believes there is an “obsession with Jews,” and when referring to the difficulty in finding a US distributor for “Orphan,” he said: “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition.”

“It’s tiring to hear the overclass of Hollywood lecture us morally,” Nemes added. “Not only in Hollywood, but in the world. There’s definitely an overclass of people cut from reality, and they are eager to preach to us … Sometimes I think it’s better if actors don’t, you know, speak up that much, because I don’t think they’re very much qualified to talk about anything. They should try to be actors, the best they can, and not become activists. It’s not really their role.”

While speaking to The Guardian, the Hungarian director also criticized fellow Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer for the speech he made at the 2024 Academy Awards. When the British director went on stage to accept his Oscar for the Holocaust-focused historical drama “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer said he and the film’s producer James Wilson “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

Nemes told The Guardian that making a film about the Holocaust “imposes on its maker a need for responsibility.”

“I didn’t feel that he was responsible at all,” Nemes said, referring to the Glazer. “I thought he wanted to please that overclass of Hollywood with the line of good, righteous thought … I don’t believe that he understands anything about the reality of the region, yet he feels the need to do it. And I think it’s very presumptuous, very condescending.”

Nemes is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel International Film Lab, which is part of the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School.

An aerial view shows Kuwait City, Kuwait, March 16, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Stephanie McGehee.

Kuwaiti jiu-jitsu gold medalist Jassim Alhatem refused to shake hands with Israeli bronze medalist Yoav Manor at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour on Friday, saying later in a video posted on social media that he has no respect for an athlete from Israel.

Alhatem won all four of his bouts in the men’s blue belt amateur under-77-kilogram category at the competition and took home the gold, while Manor earned the bronze for winning three of his four matches. At the medal ceremony, Alhatem refused to shake Manor’s hand and also declined to pose with him for the traditional photo of all the winners.

Alhatem later defended his actions in an Arabic-language video posted on Instagram. He described Israel as a “Zionist entity” and claimed he told Manor before the award ceremony, “I don’t want to know you and I don’t want to greet you. Stay on your side and I on my side, so no problem happens,” according to an English translation of the video. He further claimed that “as a Muslim,” he will not respect athletes from Israel and does not believe in separating politics from sports.

“These types we do not respect,” Alhatem said. “As Kuwaitis, we do not respect them at all … as a Muslim man, [you] must have principle. It is not right for me to play with them or respect them. It is not right. You as a Muslim must have a principle, even if you told me sport is separate from politics. No, no. There is no [separation]. If that were true, Russia wouldn’t be banned right now from participating in the Olympics.”

The International Olympic Committee has allowed eligible Russian athletes to compete as neutrals and not under the Russian flag.

The Israeli delegation at the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour said in a statement to the Israeli publication Ynet that “despite the tension, the organizers and Emirati hosts tried to calm the situation and persuade the Kuwaiti competitor to take part in the medal ceremony, but he chose to leave the podium area. Manor, for his part, remained focused on the sporting achievement: a bronze medal at a prestigious international competition, after an impressive day of bouts against opponents from around the world.”

Members of the Israeli delegation added that Alhatem said to Manor, “You Israelis kill children,” and “If you had reached the final, I would not have competed against you.”

Amir Boaron, the coach of Israel’s national jiu-jitsu team, also told Ynet that Alhatem called Manor a “child murderer.”

“Yoav continued trying to shake his hand and behave like an athlete. It is important for me to stress that the Emirati hosts welcomed us wonderfully and even apologized for the incident,” Boaron added.

The Abu Dhabi Grand Slam Jiu-Jitsu World Tour is organized by the United Arab Emirates, which normalized diplomatic relations with Israel when it signed the 2020 Abraham ​Accords, while Kuwait does not have diplomatic ties with Israel. Senior Kuwaiti officials have said the country “will be the last to normalize ties” with the Jewish state.

Jewish leaders and institutions like the ADL correctly expressed sympathy and support after Monday’s fatal shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

That really upset some people.

“Just remember the people who attend this mosque want us all to be killed,” Laura Loomer posted to X.

Loomer is an extremist, and it would be easy to dismiss her words as the fringe. But she does advise the president of the United States, and hundreds of social media posts echoed her opinion.

Many of them pointed out that 13 days after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Islamic Center Imam Taha Hassane gave a talk in which he told his congregation, “When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified — it becomes a human right.”

“We cannot accuse someone who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist,” he added. “The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself.”

In the same sermon, Hassane said that American minds were poisoned by media influenced by “Zionist sources” to hate Islam, and that “the Zionist propaganda machine” bore some responsibility for the 2023 murder of an 8-year-old Muslim boy in Chicago at the hands of a mentally unstable, Islamophobic, non-Jewish man.

Some of them also noted that two months later, Hassane’s wife, Lallia Allali, was asked to resign from the community advisory board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and resigned from a teaching position at the University of San Diego after it came to light that she had posted an image on her Facebook account of a Star of David decapitating five babies, with the caption, “The devil is killing.”

All of this is bad. None of it justifies or excuses yesterday’s violence.

Too many of us, it seems, find it hard to understand that justifying acts of violence against those who disagree with you gives them ample reason to do the same to you.

‘We don’t need to agree’

“We do not need to agree on everything to stand firmly against violence,” Rabbi Jason Navarez of Congregation Beth Israel of San Diego posted to Instagram following Monday’s attack. “The Jewish community knows all too well the vulnerability that comes when sacred space is violated. That experience should not harden our hearts, but deepen our capacity to stand with others.”

The fact is that Jewish and Muslim Americans, despite our political differences, both face the threat of political violence and hate crimes.

Jewish and Muslim houses of worship are both disproportionately targeted for violence. Jewish congregations make up just 3.2% of all congregations nationwide, but account for 22% of the attacks against houses of worship, according to a 2023 A-Mark Foundation study. (I was CEO of the A-Mark Foundation at the time of this research.) Just 0.6% of religious congregations nationwide are Muslim, yet attacks against mosques and Islamic centers account for 17% of the attacks.

Inside the vehicles of the two teenagers believed to have opened fire on the Islamic Center, killing three people before taking their own lives, authorities found gasoline cans decorated with Nazi insignia and hate literature. Muslims and Jews in this country face a common menace in the kind of hate that appears to have influenced these teens — and there are far more useful ways of fighting it than, as Loomer would have it, blaming each other.

Work to do together

First and foremost: Stop justifying violence, period. Stop glorifying terror. Stop demonizing groups other than your own. Whether from the pulpit or on social media accounts, religious leaders need to set an example.

I get the anger, fear and distrust over the imam’s statements following Oct. 7 — that’s human. But the Jewish leaders that condemned the shooting and offered support were right to do so in spite of his words — that’s humanity.

Part of me hopes that the connections made because of that solidarity, following this tragedy, will create a new opening for mutual respect. Maybe, maybe not. What should certainly come out of it is an awareness that we have a common enemy, and a common struggle.

Here’s where to start:

•Help the victims. Attacks on houses of worship are now terrifyingly common. The A-Mark report counted 59 attacks between 2012 and 2022 — and things have gotten worse since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. Inevitably, society moves on. But even if there are no dead or wounded, the scars linger. “The aftermath is just devastating,” Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich. — which recently weathered a ramming attack — told NPR. Muslims and Jews can work together to offer lasting support for victims of such violence: volunteering and donating to help rebuild damaged buildings and supporting congregants in their physical and emotional healing.

• Secure our institutions. As the attack was unfolding, leaders of Jewish Federations of North America were in Washington. D.C. seeking $1 billion in security funding for houses of worship of all faiths. This is lobbying Jews and Muslims can do together, including standing together against the administration’s conditioning of security funding on cooperation with Immigration and Custom Enforcement activities.

• Advocate for stronger gun laws. This may be the most Pollyanna-ish of all suggestions, but safe storage and gun lock laws are common in many countries, all of which have far fewer mass shootings than the U.S. It’s a cause Muslim and Jewish clergy can join in on pushing for.

• Finally, hold tech companies responsible for hate. More than half of all Americans have experienced harassment on social media, according to the ADL. Meta and TikTok’s own whistleblowers have said the companies promote hate to increase profits. Their algorithm “maximizes profits at the expense of their audience’s wellbeing,” they told the BBC. A Muslim-Jewish campaign to crack down on tech platforms that profit off hate groups and set their algorithms to push conflict could help make us all safer.

The teenagers who opened fire on the Islamic Center of San Diego didn’t care what the imam said about Gaza. They saw Muslims, and they wanted them dead — the same way the Pittsburgh and Poway shooters saw Jews. Our enemies are not making the distinctions we make about each other. Maybe it’s time we stopped making them too.

The post The San Diego imam defended Oct. 7. His mosque still deserves our help appeared first on The Forward.